Towards the end of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ novel Herland, the three men that have travelled to Herland are faced with exile from the society made of entirely women. Van, one of the three men, tries to explain to Ellador his realization that his views have changed since being in Herland. Before his experiences in Herland, Van unconsciously thought of women as a kind of man. He would have described women as attractive, but weaker and not representative of the group as a whole. Whenever Van thought of history and the progress of human achievement before Herland, he’d really been thinking of men and things men had done. He expresses his new understanding as, “When we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all the other masculine-derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and all its activities. . . . And when we say women, we think female—the sex./But to these women . . . the word woman called up all that big background, so far as they had gone in social development; and the word man meant to them only male—the sex” (Gilman 116-117).
Whenever Van is confronted by an aspect of Herlandian society that shocks his traditional sensibilities, his study of different cultures helps him to see the advantages of a new and different social arrangement. Van can now see that he’d excluded half of humanity from full membership in the society. The same situation applies in reverse for the women of Herland. In the absence of men, these women have come to think of men as a kind of woman, and to assume that the men of the outside world must be as devoted to reason, cooperation, and children as they are. This assumption, says Van, is partly why Terry’s attempted rape comes as such a shock to the women. Terry’s act was a particularly male kind of violence, directed at another person, not as a person, but as a woman. As they come to understand the outside world, the women of Herland must alter their definition of humanity, just as the men have had to. Gilman shows through Van's recognition that there are positive and negative aspects to the society Van was previously accustomed to and Herland was a way to show the imperfections and ways to change society, not just American, for the better.
